Texas supreme court rejects Republican effort to toss 127,000 drive-thru votes

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The Texas supreme court on Sunday denied a Republican-led petition to throw out nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-through voting places in the Houston area.

The all-Republican high court rejected the request from a state representative and two Republican candidates without explaining its decision. Their effort to have the Harris county ballots thrown out is still set to be taken up during an emergency hearing in federal court on Monday.

Conservative activists have railed against expanded voting access in Harris county, where a record 1.4m early votes have already been cast. The county is the nation’s third-largest and a crucial battleground in Texas, where Donald Trump and Republicans are bracing for the closest election in decades on Tuesday.

US district judge Andrew Hanen is expected to rule on the same issue on Monday. Hanen’s decision to hear arguments on the brink of election day drew attention from voting rights activists. The Texas supreme court also rejected a nearly identical challenge last month.

Conservative activists have filed a battery of challenges over moves to expand voting options during the Covid-19 pandemic. The challenges have not involved Trump’s campaign.

Trump won Texas by nine points in 2016 but polls have shown Joe Biden within reach in America’s biggest red state. Democrats need to flip only nine seats to reclaim a majority in the Texas House for the first time in 20 years, and have aggressively targeted several races in Harris county.

Harris county has offered 10 drive-through locations where its nearly 5 million residents can cast ballots in their cars instead of going inside polling centers. The accommodation aims to prevent transmission of the coronavirus.

Jared Woodfill, a former chairman of the Harris county Republican party, argued that Texas election law makes no explicit allowances for drive-through voting and that only voters who need assistance are eligible to cast a ballot curbside.

Woodfill’s lawsuit also noted that all but one of the drive-through centers were set up “in Democrat areas of the county”. More than 40% of Harris county residents are Latino, and about one in five are Black.

Counting the drive-through votes, Woodfill argued, would “call into question the integrity and legality of a federal election”.

The Texas supreme court, which is controlled entirely by Republicans, rejected an identical lawsuit last month. Harris county clerk Chris Hollins, who runs the county’s elections, had asked Republican governor Greg Abbott to affirm that the drive-through locations are legal but received no response.

Texas is one of just five states that did not allow for widespread mail-in voting this year during the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 18,000 people statewide. Abbott instead expanded early voting by one week, and that extra time helped Texas already surpass 2016’s total votes even before Tuesday’s election.

More than 9.7 million people have cast early ballots in Texas, where turnout typically ranks among the lowest in the country. Some elections experts predict that total turnout in Texas could surpass 12 million, and Harris county officials have taken more steps than most to expand voting access.

The county tripled the number of polling places and last week had eight locations that stayed open for 24 hours.